Guests Of The Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis (72 page)

He wasn’t far from the truth. Months into the crisis there was still very little effort, particularly on television, to dissect either the Iranian revolution or the American policy that had preceded it. The typical American saw images almost daily of angry Iranians waving their fists and denouncing the United States, but with few exceptions—Ted Koppel’s Nightline program each evening was one—saw little to explain what had prompted such anger and hatred. Clark’s willingness to speak unpopular truths to both sides earned him little praise or admiration. He was condemned as a traitor at home and many called for him to be prosecuted. Radio Tehran called him “the vilest of CIA spies.”

Neither Clark’s trip nor any of the other news out of Iran suggested hope for a resolution. As summer wore on, the presence of fifty-three captive Americans scattered throughout Iran had become a fact of life. Bani-Sadr pronounced the crisis “unsolvable,” and suggested that the responsibility for drawing it out rested with the United States.

“America has not changed its hostile policy and has not changed anything in it,” he said. “The Americans think Iran is their private property…and that it should remain American property forever. If they can’t have it today, they want to take over Iran tomorrow, and they are using [the hostage crisis] to add on pressure in order to topple us from inside. So we are going to live here and resist. We will live with the hostages.”

Despite the dearth of news, the months of intense coverage on television had made many of the hostages’ families into national figures, even patriotic icons. Dorothea Morefield, wife of the captive American consul, had become a regular on television news shows in San Diego and was often featured on national news programs. Always meticulously coiffed and groomed, well spoken, calm, and cheerful, this prim middle-aged housewife in oversized glasses was steadfast in her support of the administration’s handling of the crisis. When their son had been murdered in Washington, D.C., years earlier, she and her husband had been impressed by some of the reporters who had covered the tragedy with compassion and dignity. So when the embassy was seized she had decided to open her cheerful home to reporters. She was motivated initially by a desire to counter some of the maudlin, weepy scenes in the homes of other hostage families, and in the ensuing months she had developed an easy rapport with a whole group of local and national reporters. She presented the patriotic, smart, determined image that Washington felt would be most helpful in the long run. She was, in fact, angry with the State Department for many things, first for not closing the embassy and evacuating the staff prior to admitting the shah into the United States, and also for doing so little to keep the families informed. She thought the family outreach effort of the Iran Working Group was laughable, a clutch of untrained, gossipy spouses. But she kept those feelings to herself in public, working to represent her husband and the others as professionals and kidnap victims. Her resolve rarely wavered, but as the crisis became more and more noticeably a back-burner issue for the White House, now fully engaged in a reelection campaign, it wobbled ever so slightly. She did not share the view that publicity only made matters worse and worked hard to keep the story in the news. She bristled publicly at Carter’s use of the word “manageable.”

“It may be manageable, but I don’t know in what way,” she told a TV interviewer. “One hopes that there is something more going on behind the scenes.” It was a subtle criticism, more like a plea. She proceeded to defend the president’s decision to get out and campaign, and said that it would be wrong for the nation to be held captive to every new twist and turn of the story. Yet she clearly felt more needed to be done.

“Do you know where your husband is?” she was asked.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I haven’t heard from him since the rescue attempt.”

“Do you have any reservations about the way it’s being handled?”

“Well, we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes,” she said. “I would like to see a little more publicity about the hostages themselves.” She said the attention helped keep the pressure on Iran, because the more Iranians understood how much all of America cared and was watching, the less likely they would be to harm the captives. She faulted the world community for not doing more to help the United States put pressure on Iran, but unlike Barbara Timm, who had gone to ground after returning from her controversial apology in Iran, and the outspokenly critical Graves family, Morefield presented a concerned but stoical face. She was the honored guest at that year’s municipal Fourth of July celebrations and asked a crowd at an air show at Miramar Naval Air Station to “say a prayer” for their countrymen who were being deprived of their God-given freedom.

The Fourth of July flushed more of the hostage families into the limelight. Marine Rocky Sickmann’s parents were the featured guests at an Independence Day ceremony in their hometown of St. Louis, and Harry Metrinko, Michael’s father, appeared at the ceremonies near their home in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, where a new flag was added to a growing forest of Stars and Stripes for each day of his son’s captivity. The rhetorical thrust of these events and others like them was that America would never forget or forsake its kidnapped diplomats, but it had been a long eight months, and the very need to so publicly pledge mindfulness showed that the issue was dimming in the American mind.

By August the “crisis” had faded almost completely away. There was a rote, unexceptional tone to the nightly reminders on network news shows of the days of captivity, which was nearing three hundred.

Even the death of the shah in Cairo failed to produce the slightest change in the standoff. The former ruler succumbed in late July to pneumonia that had set in after another round of chemotherapy for liver cancer. An extended ABC News review of Pahlavi’s life referred briefly to Mossadeq, and even showed a black-and-white film clip of the old political figure, but only to say that he had angled to remove the young Pahlavi from power. There was no mention in the program that Mossadeq had been an elected figure, which left the impression that his efforts had just been part of a typical Third World power struggle, decided in favor of the shah by American intervention. The exiled monarch was buried in a state funeral in Egypt, a ceremony to which the United States sent only its ambassador. Carter, who just three years earlier had effusively toasted the dictator in Tehran, dared not send a more prominent representative for fear of aggravating the hostage situation.

The president remained unsparing in his criticism of Iran’s leadership, whom he called “kidnappers and international terrorists.” When he characterized its government as divided and its politics as “chaotic,” it just underscored his bewilderment. Carter was, in so many words, agreeing with Bani-Sadr. The matter appeared unsolvable. As August turned to September, the crisis had not so much disappeared from public consciousness as it had become simply a fact of life, a chronic, low-level annoyance. Near the end of summer, ABC correspondent Peter Jennings concluded, “The United States and Iran are on different wavelengths…no better able to understand each other than on the day of the takeover.”

Eventually even family members who shunned the media began to feel that no news was as bad as too much. Worried that her husband and the rest of the hostages were slipping off the country’s political agenda entirely, Penne Laingen and Dottie Morefield wrote a public letter to both the Republican and Democratic Parties urging them to mention the hostages in their platforms, to refrain from making their captive family members an issue during the campaign, and to oppose any agreement that called for the United States to apologize to Iran. A group supporting the hostages began a billboard campaign to remind the American public that their countrymen were still trapped.

The billboards read, “Have you thought of the hostages today?”

The obstinacy of their plight wore hard on the hostages. Imprisoned chargé d’affaires Bruce Laingen was amused in midsummer when he received the results of a Red Cross medical assessment conducted months earlier. Delivered by a Swiss emissary, the report found all three of the Foreign Ministry captives otherwise fit but afflicted with “moral sadness.” In Laingen’s case, it was “moral sadness, with some nervousness.”

His moral sadness had been aggravated by the participation of Ramsey Clark and other Americans in the “Crimes of America” conference. How could Clark, who had long been a respected figure in the United States, participate in such a propaganda pageant at any time, much less while his hosts were holding dozens of his countrymen hostage?

All summer long, dry, hot desert winds blew through the open windows of the stuffy third-floor of the ministry building, giving little relief. Despite the cramped, uncomfortable circumstances, Laingen, Tomseth, and Howland still got along with one another remarkably well. They had lived together in the same rooms for months now, day and night, and in all that time Laingen could not remember an angry word being spoken. This he attributed to their temperaments; all three were polite and by nature easygoing and friendly. None of them was overbearingly opinionated. They also shared a sense of victimhood, which made them each more tolerant of the others. The fact that they were being held in such spacious quarters helped. They came together when they wished and whenever one of them wanted solitude, the size of the reception area and dining room enabled them to effectively get away for hours. They spent their long days writing, reading, exercising, or working crossword puzzles, which arrived in the mail and as gifts from diplomatic visitors in a steady stream.

“How do you spell ‘chaos’?” Howland asked one day.

“I-R-A-N,” deadpanned Laingen.

The cockroaches that invaded their quarters came in two sizes, large and extra large. The three called the smaller ones “mullahs” and the larger “ayatollahs,” and took some pleasure in crunching them underfoot.

Chocolates, books, and occasional packages from home were delivered by their most faithful visitor, the Swiss envoy. On one call he passed along, laughing, an official request from the home office in Washington. It was standard procedure for the heads of embassies to produce annual employee evaluations for the department’s files. Even though the entire Tehran staff was detained under fairly remarkable circumstances, the efficient bureaucracy of Foggy Bottom still wanted its annual “fitness reports.”

For the next few days, Laingen and Tomseth worked up assessments of their colleagues. At the end of each they wrote, “This is being written in Tehran. The recipient of our report is not here because he’s being held hostage. So he cannot have any direct input.”

They sent the reports back with the Swiss envoy on his next visit.

It was more apparent every day that the one unmistakable consequence of the embassy seizure had been to tilt the balance of power in Iran toward the clergy. At the time of the revolution it was unclear how the new Iran would shake out, but voting for the Majlis in May had produced an overwhelming victory for religious hardliners and had further isolated such secular leaders as Bani-Sadr and Ghotbzadeh, whose powerlessness had been fully exposed by their failure to get all the hostages transferred to government custody. The new leader of the Iranian legislature, Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, dismissed the hostage issue as a low priority, and stated that it would not even be discussed until July.

The only contact between an American and Iran’s leadership that summer occurred when an audience with the imam was granted to Dick Gregory, who had dropped forty pounds fasting for the hostages’ release. The comedian/activist advocated a solution that would bring the majority of the Americans home, leaving only the most “suspicious” behind to stand trial as spies. Bani-Sadr, for his part, believed that President Carter was still plotting to destroy the revolution and saw conspiracies everywhere. Despite their political differences, both the embattled Iranian president and his radical religious opponents imagined a White House completely obsessed with Iran. Since they considered the United States not just amoral but evil, they developed stunning hypotheses of American deceit. Bani-Sadr accused the United States of sending teams of assassins to find and kill its own captive countrymen in an effort to bring further ignominy on Iran. Increasingly, he blamed America for the whole mess, and, in time, would convince himself that the United States had actually planned and instigated the takeover of its own embassy, and that the Muslim Students Following the Imam’s Line were either dupes or directly employed by the CIA.

When Bani-Sadr had said, “We will live with the hostages,” it alarmed Laingen. With religious authority clearly entrenched, there were regular reports of sweeping executions—dozens of “coup plotters” or “spies” were dispatched at a time. Ayatollah Khalkali held multiple public executions on the streets of Tehran, and boasted that he had personally dispatched to Allah in just three months a thousand “counterrevolutionaries” and four hundred common criminals for drug violations. Victims were put to death for homosexuality, adultery, and drug dealing as well as political crimes. Troops opened fire on thousands of leftist demonstrators as they marched in the street toward the U.S. embassy on June 12, killing five and injuring three hundred. These vicious excesses went well beyond the crimes of the shah, and the purges were just beginning. Khomeini issued an ominous call for a “cultural revolution” to rid Iran of remnants of monarchical and Western influence. Iranians from all walks of life were denounced as spies or collaborators, and many were shown “confessing” their crimes on television prior to their executions. Laingen wondered what possessed a clearly doomed man to do such a thing. Why would even a real enemy of the regime give his captors the satisfaction of admitting everything before execution? Did he do so in the hope that it would earn him clemency or protect his family and friends from arrest or persecution? It was a subject of more than just casual interest to him. Many in the Majlis were still calling for trials of the American “spies.” What would he do when his turn came?